DailyTech - MySpace Stopped Innovating Says News Corp.'s Jonathan Miller

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Internet MySpace Stopped Innovating Says News Corp.'s Jonathan Miller
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - October 23, 2009 1:03 PM

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26 comment(s) - last by GodisanAtheist.. on Oct 26 at 1:15 PM

Miller says MySpace will focus on music and gaming to turn itself around

In the early years of social networking, MySpace ruled with the vast majority of users flocking to the site. As time went by and more competition from Facebook and Twitter was raised, MySpace started to flounder in the waves of competition.

Today things are much different in the social networking space. Facebook is now the clear leader in the social networking realm and is the largest social network in America. Many have wondered what happened to MySpace that caused its fortunes to turn at a time when it was at the top.

Jonathan Miller, the overseer of News Corp.'s internet arm put it succinctly saying, "The thing you see in this space more than anything else is that if you don't keep innovating and moving forward, you get in trouble. You can't stop. And MySpace stopped."

MySpace has plans to regain its former glory, but won’t do so by fixing the plan that got the social network where it is today. Miller said, "Fix implies something was broken and you just put it back together the way it was and [consider] it's fixed. That's the wrong way to think about it. You have to think ahead."

Rather than try to tweak an old business plan to work today, MySpace plans to focus on its historic strengths of music and gaming. The social network recently purchased online music firm iLike. MySpace also announced a new music video service and dashboards for artists and record labels to get data on how well their music is doing on the social network. MySpace also put tight integration with iLike and iTunes into the new music offerings.

Miller said, "Everybody in the company is upset that we didn't keep going when we had the real momentum. Regaining momentum is always much harder than keeping momentum going."

Miller also said that the MySpace system is "too closed" to external developers and those developers are particularly needed in the gaming side of the business. Miller also hinted that MySpace would be unveiling some sort of paid premium service in the future along the lines of what The Wall Street Journal has offered.

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Plans to offer a paid service?

By Bateluer on 10/23/2009 1:12:45 PM , Rating: 5

That'll bring people back. Oh, wait, this is Earth, not fantasy land.

People will not pay for social networking. If Facebook were to charge, even a buck a month, their membership would drop exponentially as people migrated over to another social network.

RE: Plans to offer a paid service?

By killerroach on 10/23/2009 1:26:16 PM , Rating: 2

It's an implicit admission. To wit, they know they've lost in terms of membership. What they're trying to do is provide some sort of a service that a subset of the current base will pay for, thereby keeping MySpace afloat.

Considering their role in almost every music group's promotional arsenal, I am pretty sure they could leverage that into something that a non-trivial number of people would pay at least a small amount for... but it would also be a tacit tipping of their king in the chess match with Facebook.

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RE: Plans to offer a paid service?

By Lifted on 10/23/2009 2:56:27 PM , Rating: 2

Social networking sites make money through advertising. Period. Myspace users consist of kids and low-income adults (from what I've seen of it's user base). They must realize by now that they can't generate any serious ad revenue with such a user base, so they are attempting to "sell" directly their users, most of whom are so used to stealing everything that comes in electronic form that the market for music and such to this group is nonexistent. Myspace is following mp3.com into the black hole of the internet.

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RE: Plans to offer a paid service?

By Master Kenobi

(blog) on 10/23/2009 5:45:52 PM , Rating: 5

I frankly am glad to see myspace get sucked into the black hole of the internet. Too many myspace pages were just junk internet pages at their finest. I wanted to die inside everytime I saw a user created page. The thing I like about facebook is that the layout is standardized and easier to deal with in the block format. Oh and you can't set that annoying background wallpapers and music, I can't stand that.

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RE: Plans to offer a paid service?

By wempa on 10/26/2009 12:35:40 PM , Rating: 2

Amen to that ! When MySpace was starting to gain popularity, it was a real pleasure to visit the site. Then, it started going downhill. User pages got so horrible. They are cluttered up with so much junk and take so long to load every damn widget. On top of that, a lot of the custom components don't mesh well with the fixed page content. As if that wasn't bad enough, then you have to get music blasted at you and it's usually from some artist you don't care about. I haven't logged into MySpace in a couple of years and I don't regret it. I applaud Facebook for not following that awful path where MySpace has gone.

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RE: Plans to offer a paid service?

By TomCorelis

(blog) on 10/24/2009 4:42:35 AM , Rating: 3

quote:
Myspace users consist of kids and low-income adults (from what I've seen of it's user base). They must realize by now that they can't generate any serious ad revenue with such a user base,

Late night, saturday morning, and Disney/MTV/Nick TV seem to think otherwise. As would a lot of people offering home loans

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RE: Plans to offer a paid service?

By HrilL on 10/23/2009 1:28:40 PM , Rating: 2

I don't see any value with a paid service unless they limit the current value of the free services. Myspace is dieing. Social networking in general is dead to me. It was so high school and early college days. I might go on facebook once a month now a days and I'm on the internet every day.

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RE: Plans to offer a paid service?

By StraightCashHomey on 10/23/2009 3:12:44 PM , Rating: 2

When did you graduate from high school? When I graduated in 2000, there was nothing like this around.

The closest thing I had was my AIM buddy list, and people would leave away messages as their status updates.

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RE: Plans to offer a paid service?

By HrilL on 10/23/2009 4:29:46 PM , Rating: 2

I graduated in 2005 when myspace was the champ and facebook was still closed to college students only.

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RE: Plans to offer a paid service?

By LoRick on 10/24/2009 3:26:57 PM , Rating: 2

I do not use such services or site or or use to a minor extent. Such services seem to be a good way for public communication. But there seems to be a hidden fee some place. I believe that the major internet provided i.e., at&t, Virison, Cox, Comcast, etc. should get together and offer such a place to communicate for FREE as a matter of public relations, good will, and good business. They could pitch their own add on a page of two without detracting from the public communication or main goal.

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RE: Plans to offer a paid service?

By delphinus100 on 10/25/2009 1:16:50 AM , Rating: 3

For me, it's more a matter of demographics. I have a page on both sites, but I check my MySpace page only occasionally. I'm 55. Most MySpace users seem to be around a half to a third of my age, and behave/create personal pages appropriately.

Most of my contemporaries (and many younger people I know, for whom their thoughts and words are more important than blinding pages) use Facebook.

Facebook comes closer to giving me what I want. Simple as that.

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Of course they're offering a "paid plan."

By astralsolace on 10/23/2009 1:24:17 PM , Rating: 5

Myspace was bought for almost $600,000,000 by News Corp (Nice investment, Murdoch). I'm sure he's pissed that he paid an exorbitant amount of money for a bloated, unattractive eyesore of a social networking service.

Murdoch thinks he'll attract people to the crappier-than-Facebook alternative.. by offering a premium subscription plan? He's a dinosaur--and he doesn't understand the Internet at all.

People want sleek, functional and minimalist. Like Facebook (or Facebook used to be, anyway)--not Myspace pages where some idiot 12 year old kid thinks an incredibly loud rap song and 500 animated GIFs are "the coolest thing ever."

RE: Of course they're offering a "paid plan."

By ZombieRitual on 10/23/2009 2:29:29 PM , Rating: 4

Yeah I miss the old Facebook. Now I see too many damn quizzes or people getting high scores in their news feeds. At least it's still miles better than Myspace, and I refuse to use Twitter. Although I'm not ecstatic about the Twitter features that Facebook has adopted.

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RE: Of course they're offering a "paid plan."

By nitrous9200 on 10/25/2009 7:15:02 PM , Rating: 2

http://lite.facebook.com/

Enjoy.

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RE: Of course they're offering a "paid plan."

By AntiM on 10/23/2009 3:04:03 PM , Rating: 5

Murdoch also seems to think people will pay a subscription fee to view his news websites. Good luck with that!

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RE: Of course they're offering a "paid plan."

By ianweck on 10/25/2009 4:44:33 PM , Rating: 2

Yeah, not to mention charging for Hulu next year. Thanks alot Murdoch.

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RE: Of course they're offering a "paid plan."

By GodisanAtheist on 10/26/2009 1:15:38 PM , Rating: 2

Whoa whoa whoa Hulu is becoming a pay to play service?!

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Innovate???

By amanojaku on 10/23/2009 1:44:36 PM , Rating: 2

What exactly did MySpace create?

1) The profile customization was preceeded by WYSIWYG HTML editors and the proprietary layout customizations used in sites like Geocities

2) Moods are just emoticons

3) Embedded multimedia has been part of HTML for over a decade

4) Blogs have been around for nearly a decade, too

5) Comments have been a feature of pages for years

6) Bulletins? Remember the BBS?

7) IM? Uh... UNIX (y)yalk, PowWow and ICQ

8) Everything else; I'm tired of listing stuff that MySpace simple bundled together

RE: Innovate???

By SlickRoenick on 10/23/2009 2:22:26 PM , Rating: 2

Innovations are tweaks on Inventions. They don't have to come up with anything new, just a new way of doing something old.

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RE: Innovate???

By Master Kenobi

(blog) on 10/23/2009 5:47:54 PM , Rating: 2

Apple is king of that. Innovation is also a buzzard overused by most companies. It's definition stretched from one end of the globe to the other.

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RE: Innovate???

By Sazar on 10/23/2009 6:22:47 PM , Rating: 2

Apple at least has advertising going for it and, for what it's worth, has relatively clean interfaces :)

MySpace seemed to lose it's way when it was sold, but had been slowing even beforehand as a result of the things everyone here listed.

I got an account simply because my friends all seemed to have one. I haven't even touched it in about 2 years. Facebook, I don't log in online, only on my iPhone, but it's so much simpler and intuitive.

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Yeah, you're in Denial

By PandaBear on 10/23/2009 1:20:27 PM , Rating: 2

"Fix implies something was broken and you just put it back together the way it was and [consider] it's fixed. That's the wrong way to think about it. You have to think ahead."

Let's see, if it sounds like a duck and shakes like a duck....

RE: Yeah, you're in Denial

By Smartless on 10/23/2009 2:15:26 PM , Rating: 2

Lol. Or in CEO lingo.

"Fix implies that I was wrong. Since I want to look good I'm going to try something new if that doesn't work, its the economy."

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MySpace is an eyesore..

By StraightCashHomey on 10/23/2009 3:18:13 PM , Rating: 2

It was too customizable.

It's annoying to read profiles that have hot pink backgrounds with teal text, every sentence iS sPeLlEd LiKe ThIs, and you never know if "Partygurl6969" is the ex-girlfriend that you're looking to do a weekend hookup with, or just some other random slut that happened to have your ex girlfriends name.